Was I Shafted by My Sommelier?

Ever been in one of those awkward situations at a restaurant where you can’t tell if you’re being screwed over or not? When something goes awry with a menu item or the service, and your overwhelming embarrassment about your lack of knowledge about how things should be stops you from saying something? As part of our "What Went Wrong" series, we attempt to tackle the uncomfortable dilemmas that arise in the wild world of dining out.

The dilemma: Recently, I found myself in such a quagmire over a bottle of wine at a birthday dinner. I was taking my brother and some friends out to celebrate and we landed at a busy Italian spot down in Soho. We ran into a snag with our wine selection, or at least the sommelier thought so. After my brother ordered a bottle of orange wine for the table which we’d been sipping for a few minutes, we were urged to stop. According to the sommelier, the bottle was bad, and we shouldn’t have been drinking it. My brother assured him that it was fine, but the guy wasn’t having it—he insisted on removing the bottle from our table. He offered to let us look at the list again, but we just told him to substitute it with a similar bottle. He promised he’d bring us something comparable, both in terms of taste and price.

The next bottle brought out to us lived up to our standards. We ate, we drank, we laughed, we talked about missing out on (possibly) hanging out with Ja Rule the week before; basically a grand time was had by all. Fast forward to the bill’s arrival and the realization that instead of just being charged the original price of $44 for the bottle we had originally ordered (which was, by the restaurant’s admission, an error), we were charged $60 for the new bottle they brought. That’s a reasonably small difference, but it felt like it shouldn’t have happened on principle.

Was I wronged? Should they have comped me the bottle, or just left the price at $44? Was it right that I pay for the new bottle? Should I have just flipped the table in a moment of primal rage and left promptly? I settled for a passive aggressive power play of writing “LOL” next to the price on the receipt and tipping 18 percent instead of 20.

Still, I wanted answers. So I got in touch with four experts—a sommelier, a winemaker, a food critic, and an editor-in-chief—to weigh in and see how they would've handled the situation.

Kat Kinsman, Editor at Large at Tasting Table

Few social interactions stress me out more than the ones related to wine. I know I’m bringing that dynamic to the table—feeling like some Dickensian urchin with a tenuous grasp on varietals and a tighter one on my purse strings.

But I also know that my favorite wine pros are hyperconscious that a lot of their customers feel that way. They take great pleasure in matching the right drinker to the right bottle and—just as importantly—make sure a price discussion happens in a non-awkward, non-judgmental way.

Not everyone has mastered that tandem and it seems your somm kinda crashed and burned here. If you were enjoying the wine, he should have trusted your taste on that and left it alone. For the new bottle, “comparable price” was lost in translation. I’m gonna err on the side of enthusiasm rather than malice on behalf of your somm, but this was definitely on him.

It clearly left you feeling uneasy. Did you say something at the time? We’re all human and mistakes abound in restaurants. I’ve talked with a lot of restaurant pros over the years about what to do when something goes awry. The consensus is that while it sucks that you have to be put in this situation, it’s on the customer to speak up—ideally while still in the restaurant, so the staff has a chance to fix it. That might happen in the form of a comped dessert, the original bottle price being restored (bottle comp doesn’t seem reasonable to me if you did end up drinking a bottle of wine), an apology, or no action at all, but it can go a long way toward how you end up remembering the evening and if you choose to dine and drink there in the future.

André Mack, winemaker at Mouton Noir Wines

The short answer is: of course you were wronged. Something should have been done for you since you had to give up wine that you were already enjoying and pay more than you planned. If they didn’t want to comp the bottle, they could have sent desserts on the house to ensure that you didn't leave the restaurant with a bad taste in your mouth—quite literally in this case.

I do think the restaurant was correct to remove the bottle since they felt it was faulty. And while it would have been gracious of them to charge you the $44, you did waive the option to choose another bottle yourself, and most sommeliers would consider $44 and $60 within a reasonable range.

The most intriguing part of this story for me is the "bad" wine. How did the somm know the wine was bad? Did he taste it? If he did, then why did he let it go to the table? How was the wine bad? Corked? Volatile acidity?

Ryan Sutton, chief food critic at Eater NY

This is a highly unusual scenario, even for the somewhat opaque world of wine. It all becomes even more absurd when you think of it in a food context. Pretend you're about four bites into a strip steak that costs $51. You love it, but the waiter comes over and says, "listen, I'm sorry, but the chef isn't happy with your beef, I'm going to have to take that away." Sounds outrageous, right? And then the waiter says he can bring you something similar, which he does, for $16 more. This makes you even angrier because this isn't a normal steakhouse where there are only two or three steaks on the menu. In this make-believe steakhouse, there are 1,000 cuts of beef, and you couldn't possibly have had time to read the entire menu the first time around.

Catch my drift? Wine prices aren't as intuitive as regular menu prices, because there are often too many bottles on the list to expect people to read things over as thoroughly as they might a regular food menu. So you entrust someone else to do the thinking for you.

It all gets to the question of transparency versus discretion. Waiters and sommeliers try not to mention prices too often because they don't want dinner to feel like a transactional experience. And diners don't like to mention prices because they're often shy about revealing their budget to fellow companions. Talking about wine prices is like buying condoms at the corner bodega: it's weird at first but, after the second or third time everyone knows a certain road has to be crossed. Ideally, the patrons in question should have asked about the new price, and much more importantly, the sommelier should've communicated the new price regardless. And really, given the initial screw up with the cyanide-laced orange wine or whatever, would it have killed the restaurant to have cut a discount?

Chad Walsh, sommelier at Agern

There are so many problems with this situation that I don't know where to begin.

The first failure is the very existence of a "bad" bottle on the list, but, then again, what exactly made it bad wasn't clear. If it was flawed, e.g. corked or oxidized, that's not the restaurant's fault, but in that case it shouldn't have ever made it to the table. I always train my staff to pick up TCA (the chemical that causes cork taint), and I also taste, or have my servers taste, every bottle of wine before it's served to the guest just to avoid this kind of a situation.

So let's say, in theory, there actually was something wrong with the wine, the server didn't catch it, and then the sommelier came in, tasted it again (Why would he do that anyway? I don't normally taste a guest's wine after it's served, unless they insist), and found it to be flawed: If the guest is happy, why make an issue? It wouldn't be the worst thing for the restaurant if a table drank a "bad" bottle, and was happy with it.

So, why not just bring another bottle of the same wine? Maybe that was the last bottle of the random orange wine that was ordered. It happens. At the same time though, if I ran out of a wine and subbed something else in, I would ABSOLUTELY honor the initial price. Sixteen dollars is not a huge difference, but at the same time, it's very disingenuous.

You would have been totally in the clear to bring it up to a manager, and although comping an entire bottle might be an extreme measure, it's probably what I would have done. Ultimately, though, this sounds like an inexperienced sommelier operating in an environment with poor (or no) communication. Taking wine away from guests that are enjoying it is exactly the opposite of our job, and it's situations like these that give hardworking wine professionals a bad rap.

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